Kanwarpal Dhaliwal

Co-Founder

RYSE

Kanwarpal Dhaliwal is a co-founder of RYSE and currently serves as the Director of Community Health and Integrative Practice. Her work spans various fields including community organizing, youth development and leadership, intergroup relations, supportive housing, harm reduction, immigrant rights, and LGBTQQ organizing and advocacy. Above all, she works in service to shifting the conditions and culture of inequity, violence, and dehumanization of people of color and to contribute to a legacy of liberation and justice. Kanwarpal holds a Masters in Public Health from San Francisco State University.

Presentations from Facing Race 2016

RYSE’s Listening Campaign (LC) is an inquiry of the experiences of trauma, violence, coping, and healing for young people of color (YPOC) in Richmond, CA. It examines the legacy of structural racism via localized transmissions and embodiment of complex trauma, correlated social/health inequities, and collective healing and empowerment. The LC challenges dominant empiricist research that overly confound social determinants of health, ignore structural dis/ease, and harmfully enforce individual and behavior change. The dominant social science conveys and compounds pathologies that mistreat and misassign young people of color largely, often solely, to the category of risk or problem. These inaccurate pathologies are then translated into policies, practices, and investments that perpetuate and codify racial oppression and dehumanization of YPOC. By contrast, the LC employs a syndemics framework to conflate, assert, and validate YPOC’s dynamic subjectivities and social locations. The LC turns up the volume on YPOC’s voices, deepens the lens of their lived experience and expertise, analyzes and acts on such through prisms of structural racism, historical trauma, liberation and healing (in light of and in spite of the former). This session will share how the LC is influencing and leading practice, policy, systems, and field-building efforts in public health, youth development, youth organizing, racial justice, and philanthropy. It will also consider ways the LC may further advance culturally responsive and racially just policies, practices, and investments across sectors, fields, disciplines, and regions.

Presentations from Facing Race 2014

The RYSE Youth Center's Listening Campaign is an inquiry of the articulations and experiences of trauma, violence, coping, and healing for young people of color in Richmond, CA. It examines the legacy of structural racism vis-a-vis localized conditions of chronic, complex trauma, correlated health and social inequities, collective embodiment of trauma and violence, as well as collective empowerment towards healing, hope, and justice. The session will showcase RYSE’s multi-media research and base-building methods of the Campaign reflecting, elevating, and integrating youth development best practices, racial justice organizing, and systems change efforts.